Hard to be a God

Synopsis

“The source material is a sci-fi novel by the brothers Strugatsky, the same scribes whose work was adapted for Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (one of German’s favorite films), Alexander Sokurov’s “Days of Eclipse,” and others. It’s about the planet Arkanar, visited by a group of Earth scientists who’ve come to observe life on a world resembling Europe in the Middle Ages. Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik) is one of the researchers studying its volatile population, yet there’s little sense that he’s anything other than a local leader, rumored to be the illegitimate son of a god. There’s a war going on between the Blacks and the Grays, though it’s basically impossible to tell which side is which. In any event, this isn’t a film with a decipherable storyline, but rather a pageant of details designed to conjure a coarse universe where brutality and ugliness have the upper hand — surely a comment on our own degraded century. German’s chief influences (like Sokurov’s in “Faust”) are the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the Brueghels and other Northern artists whose depictions of the grotesque, the impoverished and the vulgar presented a fallen world largely incapable of fixing its eyes on salvation. “Hard to Be a God” offers no salvation, no redemptive hope in an earthly renaissance or a heavenly deliverance”.” (Variety, by Jay Weissberg) Theatrical release Germany: Spring 2015